Alcohol holiday

From today I'm on an alcohol holiday for at least a month. No wine, no beer, no lager or whisky, I'm dry. The suggestion was made by my doctor, not because I have a problem but because he thought it may be a good way to restore my energy levels and give my system a little break. He also gave me, at this routine check a clean bill of health so that was rather nice to hear, the only downside was the advice to "exercise until you sweat". This maybe means doing a bit more than stuffing a duvet into a cover whilst the heating is on so I'll be pumping up the bike tyres and getting out the garden shovel, as soon as the rain stops.

Mr Cougar has suffered a nasty little bump thanks to a rather disrespectful Citroen C2 that sneaked up and landed a cheeky punch on his front wing while he was innocently parked outside our house. It's new wing and a bit of spraying next week in the local cat's hospital. I was too traumatized by the whole thing to discuss it much at the time, such are the tiny joys and large shocks of budget motoring.

Tomorrow the schools, the libraries, the community centres and various other things are closed whilst those employed there, in support roles, have a nice day out on strike. Naturally they want more than a 2.5% pay rise and who wouldn't when inflation sits at over 4 and six Muller Fruit Corners are £2.95 (or two 6 packs for a fiver). Bring the government down I say, I'm bored with these dull Labour twats and their stiff necks and sense of humour failures, let's have a return to Tory sleaze and Nationalist bullying and little more gay banter from the LibDems.

Every so often

Every so often we go on holiday and take photos, eat strange foods, have fun and get hot and tired. Then we get back home and do all the same things in a familiar location. So this weekend is the back to normal, laundry and recovery time before heading into the deep end (for me) on Monday morning and catching up on real life. As a reminder of life's cruel edge the cats (Smudge mostly I think) managed to dismember a poor wee bird in the kitchen, utility room and downstairs toilet this morning, the floors were covered in feathers and bird remains - not the best of starts to the day.
We both like heavy metal and before the New York trip it was tank bashing for an afternoon, here are some more views of us and two of the vehicles involved.
This six wheel Alvis Stalwart is easily the worst thing I've ever driven, brutal and unresponsive and unforgiving if you make a mistake however Ali is having a good go at keeping it in the right rut here while I hang on and act as observer. Thanks to Sheila for the pics.

In Edinburgh

The Joker: The most disturbing movie villain I've seen in a while and a great performance by the late HL in an entertaining film, not sure the man got it right with the 12A certification, particularly when we're trying to eradicate the UK's knife culture at the moment.
From a vendor in Central Park, a rather tasty ice cream snack (I had two, on separate days). It reminds me that I was looking for a Grateful Dead T shirt (easy to come by in the US you'd think, even ten years after) but the only ones I could find (in an MTV shop) were in very small sizes, how can that be? Have all the Deadheads shrunk like the tribal heads in Ripley's or are they just slowly fading away in a smoky haze?

Back in Edinburgh today was spent wandering the streets with my kids and one grandson. No Cherry Garcia's on offer in Princess Street Gardens although there were some funky cones (we stuck with 99s). The street performers were out in force taking advantage of the first dry afternoon in a while, the usual tumblers and magicians and craft stalls abounded. I did like one guy I saw playing a modified dustbin lid that sounded like a pocket steel band, nice mellow and ambient sound - but folks why are you selling your CDs for £10 or £12 pounds? Get real, drop the prices to a fiver and you will do business, this is Scotland and the digital age has arrived and we all know what you could get for less money at any given car boot sale - you can see I'm not thinking like a tourist at all.

French Toast

A hand painted sign from NYC, art for advertising's sake and none the worse for that.
On holiday I sat back and did not eat any French Toast whilst others did and clearly enjoyed the experience, I may have dipped out. So today after a seasonal visit to the doctors, the Coop and the pharmacy I returned home and decided to make some toast for myself. The results surprised even me and I think I now know the three big secrets of how to make the perfect French Toast. First is, use a lot of milk and eggs and let the bread soak it up, next is to use the right bread (a high quality loaf i.e. Marks and Sparks soft, thick cut white) and finally use a really hot frying pan with only a small amount of oil. There you go.

Rain. I propose that we here in Scotland start a programme of "rain tourism" and encourage visitors from dry and under developed places to come here and stand on our street corners, under our dripping trees, walk across our wet grass and into our puddles or stare blankly out of rain stained windows. This charitable act will allow them to gain a full rain experience that will see them through their own droughts and irritating dry spells and appreciate the downside and damage done by our temperate climate.

Monday

This tedious (for some) sequence of New York photos will probably run on for a few days. I think the best way to describe my current status would be "recovering", New York is an exhilarating and exhausting place, it seems that in a week we had (or at least I had) about six months of normal Central Scotland experiences crammed in, as a result I'm tired. Just to recap however here are a few favourites from the past week.

A lady singing an operatic warning from a luggage trolley in Newark Airport.
Frankenstein dancing to a Chilean piper's music in the street.
Kids doing hip-hop acrobatics in Central Park.
Four brilliant guitar shops in one street - more original Les Pauls and pre-CBS Strats than I've ever seen.
Two fried eggs, three pancakes, syrup and two sausages at the Galaxy Diner.
The audience cheering and clapping through "Dark Night" in a cinema on 42nd Street.
Extended helicopter flight over the city.
The Naked Cowboy of Times Sq.
Cinnamon Pretzels dipped in caramel.
Dali in MoMA (despite the crowds).
Rock and roll on the Beast boat.
Buying Mr Cougar an ioniser.
Sleep (when it came).

Back from NYC

We got back from New York this morning, tired but happy after a week long visit. I thought I'd try to beat the jet-lag and post holiday laundry blues by sorting out the many snaps taken with phone and camera (groan!) so at least I made a start, a few are plonked here with as little planning as possible . The average temperature last week in in NYC was 88 degrees and it hardly let up at all so I am still recovering. The odd shady breakfast, cool beer or juice and numerous breaks in cafes and malls with air-con were the only respite from the noise and the heat but none of that can spoil time spent in New York. Above is a "room-service" breakfast for two that the four of us ate (and had leftovers from), it probably was the smallest breakfast of the week.
The view from the deck of "the Beast" a powerboat driven by two mad New Yorkers with a liking for playing Led Zep and The Village People very loudly, abusing members of the public and non-locals and squirting their passengers with water jets. At this point we're drifting with the engine off, just by the Statue of Liberty and are pretty wet but happy.
The Hudson River and New Jersey from the remains of Pier 63 or somewhere. The idea that day was to find a water taxi station, four hours later we found it but it was down by Pier 17 about five miles away.
Central Park from the "Top of the Rock", arguably one of the best city views available (unless you happen to use a helicopter which we did later) and the least frantic and busy place from which to look out over the rooftops.

It may be summer

Sometimes you go to very pleasant places then you come back, perhaps leaving those who are there behind, but the experience still stays with you.
You take a little time out, reflect, think or maybe you don't think at all because what good does that much thinking do? I'm not sure that the previous statement is a proper question but I can reflect upon that some other time. At the moment last weekend still feels like a break and a holiday.
Wind fall where no wind can blow, apricots that rattle their freshness, pears that hang on for grim death, grapes that need a few more days of dry heat and sunshine, raspberries that are just right, gooseberries that are sharp and tart but strangely sweet afterwards, strawberries that are all gone by now.

I need to add in a link on the left to Emma's new worldly wide explorations (along with the mysterious Mr K aka Kevin):

http://www.wizarding-in-oz.blogspot.com

Brian Wilson would be proud

Shoes in no particular order on a rock on a beach.
Cows v a tank, not as simple a situation as you might think.

Lay around recovering from the weekend last night eating fish pie and watching " Michael Clayton", not a relaxing film at all but worth the watch. So tensed up and tired it was an almost early night until the heavens opened at 6am and the rain battering on the roof overcame my natural desire to sleep.

I sat down at the PC thinking I had a lot to say but in a moment all my valued and random thoughts escaped like butterflies from a jar so alas I have little to write (as usual) unless some moment of clear thinking and illumination occurs.

Today at work was less than straight forward and I wondered where on earth July 2008 had gone and if we'd ever see it's like again. I thought about aeroplanes and the pavements of New York, taxi cabs and handing over foreign money and being unsure of the change to come. I pictured more rain and then hot, sunny periods and the light reflecting on the pages of a book I had read in part and had now become bored with. Then I realised that all around was a fog and that the traffic's lights were on, though some drivers refused to bend to the pressure of their peers and stayed switched off.

I chose not to listen to music but to drift away and avoid contact with anything apart from things I could eat and drink and so it was Tuesday all along, as I suspected. It was then that I remembered about Brian Wilson's sandpit and began to think if such an artistic device could ever help the likes of me.

A tiger in your tank

Nice weekend spent in overlooked and under populated Galloway, just outside Scotland. Superb weather, empty beaches and huge ex-army tanks and related heavy metal toys to play with. My photos are not quite here yet thanks to my terminal laziness and not eating properly today, tomorrow all will be normal again and the fog will lift.

Average speed, speed cameras are not my favourite thing. The drive down to Galloway was somewhat thwarted by these inhuman beasts which deserve only two fates: 1) Flattened by a tank (as per above) or b) Run down by Jeremy Clarkson in a souped up Mini.

Music

Man of constant sorrow - the chords if you will.
The Soggy Bottom Boys share a mike but not this time.
Percy Plant and Ali Kraus and a small guitar.

The music we make is not necessarily the music we'd want to make. It's what comes out as the result of an informal and illogical process that we can't quite define. The connections that are made are somehow greater than the sum of the parts and the end result is always a surprise, sometimes a disappointment and seldom what we intended. It can be strange and strangely beautiful, we are on the cusp of opportunity thanks to the development of sympathetic and affordable technology and wah wah pedals. I like these happy accidents.

Perhaps I now believe in God, but then like Annie Hall I also think that there are little people inside the radio making it work.

I have an ambivalent relationship with music, much of the time it bores me, then I need to listen to Abba or King Crimson or Miles Davis or Johnny Cash and I can't really tell why. Like the need for a food or a drink my tastes change as I veer from needing the familiar and seeking out the unfamiliar and unexpected. At other times it simply passes the time and covers the drone of the tyres on the motorway, it's more than love/hate or love/tolerate, it is unrequited and unreasonable and odd. Music styles and forms are not my special lovers and I enjoy being unfaithful with other foreign forms for no particular reason. The discovery of the quick chill on the soul of a glass of rose wine has had no effect on this situation either as the notes run across the gap between the headphones, the one that I fill so well.

A rare outpouring of energy

Came home from work and once I'd removed a mouse's tummy (the bit cat's never eat as it is sacred to them) from the carpet I set out on a car wash mission. This involves hoses and buckets and getting myself, the car and the outside of everything that is outside wet. I also got sweaty and hungry but purged a serious lump of guilt that was eating at me for not having cleaned the car for a couple of months. So involved did I become in this exercise that when Ali came home I washed her car also. Now I am tired, outside is muddy but I am at peace with a small part of the world.

Next a quick practice of a musical nature, the ironing time (spent watching the end of "Logans Run" on TCM) and a few twiddles on the mixing and mucking up desk.

Drink of the day - pink lemonade.
T shirt of the day - Top Gun.
Song of the day - Ah Ah Song.
Overtaking manoeuvre of the day - none to speak of but came close.
Yogurt of the day - Muller Light, strawberry.
Website of the day - Wikipedia "Francis Farmer".
Dustbin of the day - grey and empty at last.

Chews day

Peace has broken out after a busy weekend and the laundry is piled high as domestic bliss falls like a silent curtain and the week creeps away into next weekend. I'm mostly eating sausage rolls, brown sauce and large slabs of Tiramasu that choke blood vessels and conscience in a not completely unpleasant way, the antidote I guess would be red wine and relaxing background music. The relentless throb of a distant tumble drier to left and a creaking washing machine to the right serve to remind that indeed it is Tuesday and that we have standards to keep.

No exciting news today either, this is due to me avoiding watching TV and not listening to the radio, I find time crawls along nicely without the random audio punctuations and smug and polished presenters asking opinions and then passing them out as actual news.

I also have that feeling of needing to do something more than the little that I am currently doing. Perhaps I should feed wild birds, hoover the car or iron the bright parade of shirts that hang in the airing cupboard. The other thing I could do is get out a guitar and switch on something electrical.

I am the chef

Following on from yesterday's near death experience only avoided thanks to a working parachute a small celebration was called for. Thankfully the weather held and we had a bbq/berry picking Sunday afternoon. I was on decent bbq form for a change and little if any food was burned and as I was driving later I remained none the worse for the demon drink. Could this be the secret of how to cook? Meanwhile Ali produced a storm of salads and crackers and deserts that seemed never ending and then led the assault on the berry bushes.

Various random children, grandchildren, friends and free loaders also took the opportunity to pick blackberries from our acres of untended garden. They picked berrys in shifts for about three hours and hardly made a dent on the huge crop. Next year we're calling in the boys from Ribena to carry out a harvest after which we will retire to the South of France laden with blue-stained wads of cash.

Food of the day - bbq chicken breast, slightly warmed in the oven first.
Guitar of the day - my renovated dobro fixed by "Fingers" Farrel.
Drink of the day - pink lemonade.
TV prog of the day - a dull episode of Top Gear (the only thing I saw).
Conversation of the day - Skipe call to Emma in Oz.
T Shirt of the day - Sponge Bob.
Vibration of the day - the old petrol lawnmower.

Parachute

A wet Saturday spent for the most part near Anstruther watching my daughter and her husband doing a parachute jump. How easy to handle or stressful can it be seeing your child (grown up) jumping from a ramshackle aircraft at 10000ft? It was however a fun day and the sun eventually shone on all the participants and I did have a nice bacon and egg roll and some plum pie ice cream.

Mistake of the day - driving on the runway.
Phrase of the day - "get over it!"
Drink of the day - coffee at the airstrip.
Drive of the day - Aberdeen to Anstruther in the rain.
Weather of the day - sunny eventually.
Sleep of the day - about three hours.
Film of the day - "Thank you for smoking", best film I've seen in ages.

Annoying sun

A fine example of the sun wearing sun glasses in that peculiar and senseless way it does.

Sign of the times

Everyday (well most days) I drive past a sign that declares "Burntisland the best day out in Scotland". Apart from any obvious comment you might make about it, what I most dislike about this sign is the little sunny face (a cartoon sun) wearing sun glasses. Ask yourself, why would the sun wear sunglasses? It's like a cloud carrying an umbrella or a star looking up through a telescope. The sun should never be shown wearing glasses, it has no eyes and where exactly is the bright light coming from that it bothering it anyway.

On the creative side of things I spent most of a wet Wednesday evening mixing and remastering a couple of songs that Ali had vocalised on. The hardest part is listening over and over to various widths, compressions, effects, hard and soft tones screwing around with your tracks and then deciding on one master sound to apply. Meanwhile some thirteen miles away Lenny Cohen poured his heart out to the good folks of Edinburgh in a night many will remember till the next big night. I have to keep asking myself why am I not really bothered about him, or Tom Waits or any other iconic icon from the recent past when for so many others it's all the bees knees. Clearly my grip has been lost and I have sold out to a comfortable chair, a glowing pc screen and a cool drink.

Book of splinters

Driving across Glasgow is pretty awful, it's not the place, it's the ground up traffic and the lack of a solution to unsticking this ongoing problem. Nothing moves for long periods of time and for no obvious reason, the laws of mechanics are rendered unworkable by a mass conscience made up of mechanical machines with their soft pilots, so (as a separate matter) thank you darling Alister for deferring the 2p hike for six months. We shall try to dance in the congested streets at some point to celebrate, trip on a pot hole and so begin a lengthy court case for compensation.

Lenny boy Cohen gets my vote for quote of the day: "Since then (when I was 60) I've taken a lot of Prozac and I've also also studied religion and philosophy - but cheerfulness kept breaking through."

I don't quite know what I mean by "Book of Splinters" but I like the title and feel a strange urge to incorporate it into a project at some point. These thoughts come and go like swifts on a telephone wire but that's ok, the swifts seem to know their own business and I do admire their busy little lifestyle.

Thanks to Paul for the sensible perspective on an insane world presented in the comment on the previous post.

Laugh? I nearly wrote a song...

I picked up the following quote on the BBC website:

" In doing so, they come up against the guardians of traditional morality -such as the Christian Action Research and Education (CARE) group which condemns "unconstructive" relationships based on "the dominion of one person over another"."

The good people from CARE were giving their view on Max Mosley's S&M lifestyle, I couldn't quite square some aspects of this modern church view with "unconstructive" relationships based on "the dominion of one person over another". I do recall however, a long time ago watching an old, obscure B&W Russian movie on the life of Christ where a particular scene stuck with me. For some reason on the road to Golgotha the Christ character, full of pain and being taunted by the crowds mouths the words, "All power is tyranny!", in a despairing and profound manner. I sometimes think that was the clearest glimpse into the supernatural I ever experienced, but it was gone in the moment.

"Oh them that defend what they cannot see with the killer's pride, security, it blows their mind most bitterly to think that death's own honesty won't fall upon then naturally. Life sometimes must get lonely, and if I though dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Bob Dylan: It's alright ma.

The Channel 4 doc on the Qur'an last night didn't help, what a crap, evil and contradictory religion Islam is (if you believe C4's expose). The "old masters" came across as blinkered bigots and the "young guns" as equally deluded and passionately dangerous - the rub being that depending on what translation of the good book you believe martyrs will either get the gift of 72 virgins or a bunch of grapes when they enter paradise. Eh? What kind of bollocks is this and how can seriously clever and powerful people buy in?

On the plus side our recording career has resumed with "Air kisses", "Garden of music" and the strangely ambient "Ah Ah song" making rapid progress on the strength of a two day old curry and a few glasses of white wine. On the negative side Smudge ate a sparrow and spat the feathers out all over the house.

Raspberry Beret

Over the weekend we ate a lot of raspberries, a fruit Ali describes as "Scottish". I suppose that in a certain north of Dundee, DC Thompson and Angus glens way they most certainly are. Once these soft berries are converted to jam they are, in my opinion best avoided. We also watched the film "Atonement", not exactly a laugh a minute affair but very watchable thanks to some fine cinematography and a decent cast, the overall experience was however a little bleak.

Home recordings: Following the Confushion brothers visit I dusted down the mighty MRS-802 to see what gems I'd last recorded (about 18 months ago) and I made up a list. In doing so I had to make up titles as most of the 16 tracks I found were in the key of anonymous. Some of them were actually OK and on the second listen usable perhaps. "Air Kisses", "Pools", "Eagles" and "Sugar" may at some point see the light of day either as ambient pieces or actual songs, you can never tell what will come out of a buried treasure trove (some best left buried perhaps). I also hooked up Dr Drum for an impromptu six track (may go to eight) version of the old Blind Faith (Steve Winwood) track "Can't find my way home". It comes in at an economical 2 minutes 5 seconds and features two guitar, two drum and two vocal tracks. The drum tracks include Dr Drum's fine "John Bonham" super gong sound at least twice, it may not make the final cut. I'm now thinking about a phased guitar for track seven, this amusement never ends.

Road Tax: If ever a government was set on cutting it's own throat it's this one, not content with bolstering a financial and fuel crisis with their inaction they are now set on upsetting 9 million MPV and 2 litre saloon owners by hiking up the tax on the congested potholed and gravel parking lots that used to be known as roads. Great, the only good news being that you'll now be able to buy that Range Rover you always promised yourself for about £500. Then you can stick it in your drive and live in it while renting out your house to homeless Americans on the run from Aunt Fannie-May.

Two weeks since the party

The helium has gone home to ten thousand feet or the centre of the earth, local air traffic is curious but not disturbed and the West wind blows where it will. Two weeks ago the bonfire was lit and it seems to have rained every day since while we held the sculpture of balloons prisoner, now they are free and...in the dustbin.